From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway is known for works like A Farewell to Arms and The Old Man and the Sea. After high school he enlisted in the military and served as an ambulance driver during World War I. He was seriously wounded in 1918 and sent home. His novel, A Farewell to Arms (1929), formed the basis of his experiences during his time abroad in Italy.

He worked as a foreign correspondent. It was through the modernist writers, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the Lost Generation that he was discovered. Those writers were: F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, Waldo Peirce, Isadora Duncan, Erich Maria Remarque, John Dos Passos, Abraham Walkowitz, and Alan Seeger. Alan Seeger would go on to write Rendezvous with a Bullet and perish during WW I. Fitzgerald read Hemingway’s manuscript titled The Sun Also Rises and being so impressed with it sent it  to his own publisher. If it were not for Fitzgerald, Hemingway and his manuscript, might never have been discovered.

Hemingway wrote many novels and tried his hand at poetry. Believing his best years were behind him, and thinking he was no longer capable of being productive, Hemingway committed suicide in 1959 at his residence in Ketchum, Idaho. He was a Nobel Peace Prize winner and is seen as one of the great American 20th century novelists. Here are some of works:

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“Indian Camp” (1926)

The Sun Also Rises (1926)

A Farewell to Arms (1929)

“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (1935)

For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)

The Old Man and the Sea (1951)

A Moveable Feast (1964, posthumous)

True at First Light (1999)

The Age Demand

The age demanded that we sing

And cut away our tongue.

The age demanded that we flow

And hammered in the bung.

The age demanded that we dance

And jammed us into iron pants.

And in the end the age was handed

The sort of shit that it demanded.

Along with Youth

A porcupine skin,

Stiff with bad tanning,

It must have ended somewhere.

Stuffed horned owl

Pompous

Yellow eyed;

Chuck-wills-widow on a biassed twig

Sooted with dust.

Piles of old magazines,

Drawers of boy’s letters

And the line of love

They must have ended somewhere.

Yesterday’s Tribune is gone

Along with youth

And the canoe that went to pieces on the beach

The year of the big storm

When the hotel burned down

At Seney, Michigan.

Champs D’Honneur

Soldiers never do die well;

Crosses mark the places —

Wooden crosses where they fell,

Stuck above their faces.

Soldiers pitch and cough and twitch —

All the world roars red and black;

Soldiers smother in a ditch,

Choking through the whole attack.

To Good Guys Dead

They sucked us in;

King and country,

Christ Almighty

And the rest.

Patriotism,

Democracy,

Honor–

Words and phrases,

They either bitched or killed us.

I Like Americans

By A Foreigner

I like Americans.

They are so unlike Canadians.

They do not take their policemen seriously.

They come to Montreal to drink.

Not to criticize.

They claim they won the war.

But they know at heart that they didn’t.

They have such respect for Englishmen.

They like to live abroad.

They do not brag about how they take baths.

But they take them.

Their teeth are so good.

And they wear B.V.D.’s all the year round.

I wish they didn’t brag about it.

They have the second best navy in the world.

But they never mention it.

They would like to have Henry Ford for president.

But they will not elect him.

They saw through Bill Bryan.

They have gotten tired of Billy Sunday.

Their men have such funny hair cuts.

They are hard to suck in on Europe.

They have been there once.

They produced Barney Google, Mutt and Jeff.

And Jiggs.

They do not hang lady murderers.

They put them in vaudeville.

They read the Saturday Evening Post

And believe in Santa Claus.

When they make money

They make a lot of money.

They are fine people.

I Like Canadians

By A Foreigner

I like Canadians.

They are so unlike Americans.

They go home at night.

Their cigarets don’t smell bad.

Their hats fit.

They really believe that they won the war.

They don’t believe in Literature.

They think Art has been exaggerated.

But they are wonderful on ice skates.

A few of them are very rich.

But when they are rich they buy more horses

Than motor cars.

Chicago calls Toronto a puritan town.

But both boxing and horse-racing are illegal

In Chicago.

Nobody works on Sunday.

Nobody.

That doesn’t make me mad.

There is only one Woodbine.

But were you ever at Blue Bonnets?

If you kill somebody with a motor car in Ontario

You are liable to go to jail.

So it isn’t done.

There have been over 500 people killed by motor cars

In Chicago

So far this year.

It is hard to get rich in Canada.

But it is easy to make money.

There are too many tea rooms.

But, then, there are no cabarets.

If you tip a waiter a quarter

He says “Thank you.”

Instead of calling the bouncer.

They let women stand up in the street cars.

Even if they are good-looking.

They are all in a hurry to get home to supper

And their radio sets.

They are a fine people.

I like them.

Montparnasse

There are never any suicides in the quarter among people one knows

No successful suicides.

A Chinese boy kills himself and is dead.

(they continue to place his mail in the letter rack at the Dome)

A Norwegian boy kills himself and is dead.

(no one knows where the other Norwegian boy has gone)

They find a model dead

alone in bed and very dead.

(it made almost unbearable trouble for the concierge)

Sweet oil, the white of eggs, mustard and water, soap suds

and stomach pumps rescue the people one knows.

Every afternoon the people one knows can be found at the café.

Neo-Thomist Poem

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not

want him for long.

Riparto D’Assalto

Drummed their boots on the camion floor,

Hob-nailed boots on the camion floor.

Sergeants stiff,

Corporals sore.

Lieutenant thought of a Mestre whore —

Warm and soft and sleepy whore,

Cozy, warm and lovely whore;

Damned cold, bitter, rotten ride,

Winding road up the Grappa side.

Arditi on benches stiff and cold,

Pride of their country stiff and cold,

Bristly faces, dirty hides —

Infantry marches, Arditi rides.

Grey, cold, bitter, sullen ride —

To splintered pines on the Grappa side

At Asalone, where the truck-load died.

Chapter Heading

For we have thought the longer thoughts

And gone the shorter way.

And we have danced to devils’ tunes,

Shivering home to pray;

To serve one master in the night,

Another in the day.

Captives

Some came in chains

Unrepentant but tired.

Too tired but to stumble.

Thinking and hating were finished

Thinking and fighting were finished

Retreating and hoping were finished.

Cures thus a long campaign,

Making death easy.